National Preparedness Goal vs. Disaster Psychology Missions Discussion

When looking at the commonalities and differences between the National Preparedness Goal put out by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) vs the mission repertory of disasters, we should first look at the objectives of these two methods:
 
 I will compare the concepts of Preparation and Recovery within the methods. The first look at determent. Both methods address the idea of Prevention. That is where the similarities end. As far as the differences:

 Disaster Psychology Mission Set (DPMS):

Anticipation and Preparation – One of the focuses is on the “important differences in the ways individual’s vs organizations prepare for the disaster.[1] These preparations can be for anything, from natural disasters to man-made events.

Homeland Security Cycle (HSC):

Prevention- Focuses on how to physically prepare for incidents, more specifically terrorism driven. “Prevention also includes the intelligence, law enforcement, and homeland defense activities conducted in the event of an act of terrorism in the homeland to determine if follow-on attacks are planned and to thwart and/or apprehend the adversary.”[2]

 Now looking at the concept of Recovery:

 DPMS:

Resilience and Recovery- This idea considers how the disaster will impact the frame of mind of those impacted.  The reason being that you can have all the resources available to you, but unless the individuals in the community have healthy and positive influences to foster mental resilience, the physical recovery will be stalled until that is accomplished.[3]

 HSC:

“Recovery includes those capabilities necessary to assist communities affected by an incident in recovering effectively. It is focused on a timely restoration, strengthening, and revitalization of the infrastructure”.[4] This one sentence demonstrates where the focus of the HSC really is, on the infrastructure. These are shelter, roads, power, etc. The entire focus of the National Preparedness Goal is on physical.

As you can see, the HSC focuses on the material or physical aspects of disaster preparation, while the DPMS focuses on how people behave with this knowledge. I believe that the HSC can learn from DPMS that there is more than physical needs have to be address when dealing with disasters, whereas DPMS can incorporate better overall preparation strategies that can be found in HSC.

 Cheers


Information obtained from Penn State course "HLS 558 Disaster Psychology"